“I Have Written… Not… a Careerist Ticket-Punch or… a Performance to Win Applause in þe Moment…”, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-13

Sep 13, 2022

FIRST: “I Have Written… Not… a Careerist Ticket-Punch or… a Performance to Win Applause in the Moment…”

Claude Ury: Library Journal: ‘This volume… is destined to become a classic…’

Not yet time to sing the Nunc Dimittis, but getting close! Those are very nice words to hear.

I was, not, however, arrogant enough to put anything like this in the book:

Thoukydides the Athenian: The Peloponnesian War: ‘The absence of the fabulous in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In sum, I have written my work, not as a careerist ticket-punch or as a performance to win applause in the moment, but as a treasure for all time…
καὶ ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται: ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν ξύγκειται…
LINK: <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0200%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D22%3Asection%3D4> I.22.4

Cf.: Hunter Rawlings: Ktema te es Aiei... Akouein

Plus yesterday there is the very nice New Republic review of Slouching <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> (and also of Thomas Piketty’s excellent Brief History of Equality <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LMS2TTB>) by Tim Noah:

Tim Noah: Why Isn’t Everybody Rich Yet?: ‘The twentieth century promised prosperity and leisure for all. What went wrong?…

The one thing disappointing to me in Tim Noah's review is that he does seem to have missed the forest. He wants to claim that the 20th century really came to an end in 1980 with the Neoliberal Turn and the rise of the Neoliberal Order, as that was when, as Eric Hobsbawm put it in his 1977 lecture, “The Forward March of Labour Halted”. But a forward march toward greater equality and greater prosperity is profoundly not the story of the 20th century, at least not of my 20th century.

It is quite disturbing to me and someone is smart and as careful or reader as Tim Noah had this reaction, especially because I tried to take great pains to hit people over the head with the grand narrative—as Tim notes, sixteen variations in the text on “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market”.

So let me try again:

In 1870 technological progress achieves critical mass
Thereafter human technological prowess doubles every generation
That means a truly human world—one that solves the problem of baking a sufficiently large economic pie, after which the problems of slicing and tasting it—equitably distributing and properly utilizing our wealth—should be easy to deal with
Technological advance, however, is Schumpeterian creative destruction
Immense wealth creation, coupled with the destruction of industries, occupations, livelihoods, and communities. Every generation. And then it happens again.
The forces-of-production underlying hardware is being replaced every generation.
Thus the economic-sociological software—the rough running code of society—needs to be rewritten on the fly every generation.
Cobbled-together so that it will not crash, for whatever worked well a generation ago will not work well, or not work at all, today.
This rewriting takes place in tension between von Hayek and Polanyi
Von Hayek: the market can give us wealth but not fairness or justice. But reaching for fairness and justice will destroy the wealth-creation and put us on the Road to Serfdom: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market” is the best we can do.
Polanyi: the market says the only rights that matter are property rights, but people think they have and demand other rights: comfortable communities, economic stability, the proper allocation of incomes to the deserving. Tell people the only real rights are property rights and they will revolt, and the system will crash.
Polanyi: government must recognize and accomodate the fact that “the market was made for man, not man for the market”.
It is this unresolvable tension in how to rewrite the software economic-sociological code every generation on the fly that has caused the problems of slicing and tasting the economic pie—of equitably distributing it so that everyone has enough, and of using our technological powers to enable us all to live our lives wisely and well—have flummoxed and continue to flummox us.

It is this process that runs history from 1870-2010. And this form of history is the one that comes to an end in 2010, with the exhaustion of the final attempt to find a satisfactory solution, with the exhaustion of the Neoliberal Order as the way to manage the constant rewrite of economic and sociological patterns and institutions—with no alternative (yet) in sight and with attention shifting to the 21st century issues of global warming, nuclear proliferation, and authoritarian challenge.

Yet more evidence that the book I think I wrote is not the book people read. And so I resolve to figure out how to do better in the future at conveying my Grand Narrative message to structure the webs of knowledge people create in their own minds as they read my books…

One Video:

Emily Liner: Friendly City Books: Book Talk: Brad DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

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We are all coupon-clippers:

Very Briefly Noted:

Adam Tooze: Top Links #95: Yeats… Schumpeter… China-US Life Expectancy (Again): ‘Fintan O’Toole: WB Yeats's Rule: “The more quotable Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming, seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are…
Dorian Lynskey: 'Things fall apart': The Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats's “The Second Coming”: ‘One reason for the poem’s booming popularity was its supporting role in two influential masterpieces. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart…. Joan Didion’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) had a similar effect in the US at a time of stomach-churning flux…
Social Studies: Navin Narayan Memorial Lecture
Social Studies: A Brief History
Cory Doctorow: Spotify is a Ripoff, a Spotify Exclusive: ‘More Chokepoint Capitalism stunt-publishing…
Giles Wilkes: “In 2001 DeLong and Summers wrote this very readable piece <https://t.co/4UH99VyAbM>. But it contained two wrong forecasts: that new tech would struggle to gain monopoly rents, and its economic weight would grow. Fascinating: J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers: The ‘New Economy’: Background, Historical Perspective, Questions, and Speculations <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6793328.pdf>…

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¶:

Anthony Grafton: How to Cast a Metal Lizard: ‘The knowledge that underpins our world of things, by contrast, has been discovered over centuries, through trial and error, two steps forward and one step back. It has been produced and improved by collaboration: the work of talented, largely anonymous groups, generation after generation, rather than identifiable individuals. And it is less verbal than embodied. Most of the experiments involved in forming a craft and the practices used to teach and further develop it go unrecorded, as do those who carried them out…. Teaching in the world of things is often physical: the teacher urges pupils to apply all of their senses and employs gestures as well as words to make clear how one wields a tool or decides if something has finished cooking…. No notes preserve those lessons. How can we hope to discover how a medieval blacksmith learned to forge tools or a Renaissance tailor learned to cut brocade? Embodied knowledge is—or was, in an age before prefabrication had taken command—incredibly varied…. Expertise that had to be acquired by touch and hearing, smell and sight. This sort of learning is gained by handling objects. It means training one’s hands to do many basic things precisely, quickly, and automatically—leaving the mind free to concentrate on the most complex parts of the task.

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Philip Koop

I think it inevitable that the book you write is not exactly that which we read, just as you have never read the precise book that anyone else has written. But you may have exaggerated the degree to which Tim Noah has misread you, rather than simply having different concerns and interests.

You have a grand narrative arc that runs something like this: sometime around 1870, certain parts of the world got really good at baking bigger pies every year than the year before. This change was prefigured by a similar but lesser change in 1820 and an even lesser one in 1500, but the dramatic inflection point is around 1870 and also that is when this pie baking skill began to spread inexorably throughout the world.

Eventually, the degree to which each pie was bigger than the year before began to decline, but the decline came not with a bang but with a fizzle, for we still increase the size of pies faster than we did before 1870. From this perspective, it is difficult to bring your narrative to a satisfactory conclusion.

Within the grand narrative of the long 20th century, there is a sub-narrative of a short 20th century during which we got better at dividing and tasting pies; a bridge between gilded ages, let us say from about 1919 to 1980. Thereafter, we became worse at dividing and tasting pies again, although we have not yet declined to J.P. Morgan's heyday.

You have chosen to bring your grand narrative and sub-narratives to a close simultaneously in 2010 by marking the "exhaustion of the final attempt to find a satisfactory solution" to the conflict inherent in the social changes required to keep increasing the size of pies while also dividing them fairly. It helps that this seems roughly to coincide with a negative inflection point in the rate of pie size increase. But someone, say Tim Noah, may accept both your greater and lesser narrative arcs without accepting that we have indeed exhausted our final attempts at dividing pies. And I do think that the weakest part of your story lies in explaining what was special about the bridge between gilded ages and why it will not come again.

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Tom Barson

Hopeless Eclectic

First, I'm enjoying the book hugely.

Second, I love how you get off the grand narrative often enough to provide telling details (like your mini, wealth-trajectory-based bio of Herbert Hoover), and that you let these speak for themselves.

Third, about the grand narrative (and perhaps this speaks to comments like those of Tim Noah), I'm wondering whether the thematic Hayek-Polanyi tension that you establish masks other relevant tensions, whether we don't need even a bit more Schumpeter than we get, and whether Schumpeter doesn't get closest to your key theme that the dynamism that creates our wealth also costs us (or some of us) everything we have. Why do some populations (at some times, in some situations) embrace this level of change, while others make "embedded" complaints of the sort you describe? Is the dynamism you describe in the book (and above) sustainable? Have its technological and social aspects diverged? Did the latter arise from a nothing-to-lose moment in history that perhaps can't be repeated in now-rich countries? anyway, I'm wondering all these things - only 1/3 through the book - and it's a rich experience.

[Aside:I have to admit Karl Polanyi mystifies me as much today as he did when Manny Wallerstein assigned parts of "The Great transformation" for his "Transformation of Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries" class, 50 years ago. At the highest level - one which you summarize very well - Polanyi's thesis seems both important and correct, but he makes so many historical and logical errors in establishing it that I just couldn't follow him as an undergraduate. I grant that it didn't take much back then to throw me off a scent - but I still have trouble with that book.]

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